Nakamichi is a Japanese manufacturer of consumer electronic products, pioneering the development of high-quality cassette tape recorders.

The company was founded in 1948 by Etsuro Nakamichi in Tokyo, under the name Nakamichi Research. It initially focused on electromagnetics, magnetic recording technology, acoustics and communications. In its early years, the company carried out contract research work for government, universities and industry. The open reel tape recorders developed by Nakamichi were sold by other major brands, until with the development of the cassette, the company began manufacturing high quality tape recorders, sometimes still for other major companies, selling under its own brand name from 1972 onwards.

In 1973, Nakamichi became one of the first manufacturers to introduce recorders with three separate heads, the Nakamichi 1000 and the Nakamichi 700. This made it possible to directly manage the tape recorder, allowing the recorded music signal to be listened to or checked while the recording was in progress. In addition, the design made it possible to improve sound quality, because the recording and playback heads require different air gaps with respect to the tape. In the United States, these two recorders were given the name Tri-Tracer to draw attention to the new technology.

In the 1980s, Nakamichi's most famous device was the "Dragon" cassette deck, which used three heads with automatic azimuth adjustment of the playback head. This meant that recordings with an azimuth error, for example from third-party devices, could be played back in high quality. This technique was originally developed by Marantz, but unlike their piezo system, Nakamichi used conventional electric servo motors.

Another unique speciality at Nakamichi were the so-called UDAR (Uni Directional Auto Reverse) cassette decks of the RX series. Unlike conventional self-reversing devices, the head was not turned at the end of the tape by pressing a button, so that the direction of the tape was reversed at the same time, but the entire cassette was turned by a special mechanism, which placed it in a transparent plastic housing where it changed its face and returned it to the reading position extremely quickly, taking the same amount of time as changing the direction of the drive belt in conventional devices. This technology had two advantages: on the one hand, synchronisation distortion was reduced in the first few seconds of reading, and on the other hand, the sounding head was mounted in a permanent fixed position, which benefited the azimuth accuracy.